Ever been frustrated with sites like Facebook, Myspace and other social networks, but feel that your company or organization could really benefit from being a part of a social network? Does not having control over the ads, branding and other aspects make them not an option, or a bad option?

There is a solution I will already recommend, even before its official launch from beta. I’ve been playing around with a couple installs of Buddypress, along with a couple custom plugins, allowing you to take complete control of your own social network, and offer a place that people can interact with your business offerings. There are other “free” solutions out there already for creating your own social network, but they tend to offer you a freebie version, with limitations, and lock you into buying add-ons. Many have limitations with resources, because the site is actually hosted on their server, instead of on your own. Not to mention, most are not open source, or have anywhere near the following that the WordPress community has.  Buddypress is run entirely on your own server, without any paid add-on limitations, and will change the way people and organizations interact with one another.

Buddypress is completely open-source, and one of the great reasons why WordPress is so great. Projects like Buddypress can arise from nowhere, because of the great extensibility of the WordPress blogging platform.

Buddypress is different than the other software already available, and I feel will be a major player in the social networking realm, as did WordPress for blogging. Buddypress is currently limited to running on WordPress MU, but will soon be released as a set of plugins for the WordPress standalone version. I feel this is an exciting thing, and can only help move WordPress forward as well. Obviously Automattic felt the same way, by taking in Buddypress and Andy Peatling, the lead developer, under its wings.

The versatility and extensibility that WordPress offers, along with a substantial community of great developers helping out, makes Buddypress an option for many organizations, including non-profits, in the need to expand their reach to a larger community-based audience.

I’m sure you will hear much more on this from me in the near future.

The first method is to use the “Optional Excerpt” field when posting and a plugin called DBPostsForCategory. It’s hard to find because the developer’s site (Dhruba.net) has been down for awhile, but you can download it here: DBPostsForCategory.txt. Change .txt to .php.

You can add html to the “Optional Excerpt” field for each post pointing to any image, thumbnail or icon. In this case we’ll point it to a 24×24 icon “myposticon.gif”
The code you’d enter in the optional excerpt would be:

<img src”http://yourdomain.com/pathtoimage/myposticon.gif” />

or you could add a link to your excerpt so the icon links to the post also. You’d use this:

<a href=”http://yourdomain.com/yourpost/”><img src”http://yourdomain.com/pathtoimage/myposticon.gif” /></a>

Next thing to accomplish would be a list of new posts with the images (excerpts) next to them. Upload and activate the DBPostsForCategory plugin and use this code in your template:

<?php DBPostsForCategory :: printAsExcerptItems(1, 5, true) ?>

You can adjust the category using the first number in the array, how many posts shown, and change to false for descending order. So if you wanted to list the latest 10 excerpts from category ID 7 in ascending order you would use:

<?php DBPostsForCategory :: printAsExcerptItems(7, 10, false) ?>

Now, another way to achieve virtually the same thing, but using custom fields you would first need to add a custom field key and a url value pointing to the image. For example:

Key: icon Value: http://www.yourdomain.com/myposticon.gif

Now we have to edit your template with some php to show this custom field. We are going to want to show the post icon linked to the post. So here is the code to achieve this:

<?php $iconfield = get_posts(‘numberposts=10&category=7′); foreach($iconfield as $post) : setup_postdata($post); ?>
<a href=”<?php the_permalink(); ?>”><img src=”<?php echo get_post_meta($post->ID, “icon”, true); ?>” alt=”<?php the_title(); ?> icon” /></a>
<?php endforeach; ?>

You could of course show the icons to the left of the post title. You would use this code instead:

<?php $iconfield = get_posts(‘numberposts=10&category=7′); foreach($iconfield as $post) : setup_postdata($post); ?>
<a href=”<?php the_permalink(); ?>”><img src=”<?php echo get_post_meta($post->ID, “icon”, true); ?>” alt=”<?php the_title(); ?> icon” /></a> <a href=”<?php the_permalink(); ?>”><?php the_title(); ?></a>
<?php endforeach; ?>

You could of course add any number of custom fields using this method and it can be used in countless ways. All you would need to do to add another custom field is change the ($post->ID, “icon”, true) to read ($post->ID, “CustomFieldKey”, true).

I use custom field in the header to show a list of my latest portfolio items with a custom thumbnail, post title and a snippet of what I contributed to the project. A small bit of CSS styling with either method and you are on your way to making your site a more dynamic and more importantly contributing to the overall look and feel. Let me know if you know another way to achieve this, or if this was useful to you and your site.